Less is Now
The hospital where you were born
was razed twenty years ago,
the land developed as a
shopping mall and condos.
Your parents have also passed on –
but not to provide shopping and living space
you hope.
.
The grammar school was shuttered,
the high school abandoned.
Changing demographics
then started in with its wrecking ball.
And, of course, there’s no point
in looking for the house you grew up in.
Something called Lakeland Estates
was built atop its bones.
.
The mom and pop shops
down Main Street
long ago succumbed to
the chain-stores rimming the town.
In fact, there no longer is a town.
It’s a commuter suburb
from its strip malls to its Park and Ride.
.
With no more family,
the person you were
exists only as a memory.
And even that is
fading with the years.
.
It’s nostalgia for now
and darkness in the days to come.
Your calendar’s almost complete.
.
John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident. Recently published in Midwest Quarterly, Poetry East and North Dakota Quarterly with work upcoming in South Florida Poetry Journal, Hawaii Review and the Dunes Review.
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North of Oxford 